~ Librarian, Researcher and Lunar Lady

Tag Archives: heritage

In the 1990s television series Quantum Leap, the central character Sam Beckett (played by the magnificent Scott Bakula) posited the following theory of time travel. A person’s life is like a piece of string; tie the two ends together and the string becomes a loop. Roll the loop into a ball and points in one’s life criss-cross, making it possible to leap forwards and backwards in time.

It’s not surprising the idea of past and present crossing each other for brief moments appeals to me; of time, like a ribbon, curling back and two disparate points in history touching. During my adventures in research there have been plenty of instances when it felt like time had done just that; folded in on itself and my present has touched another’s past. The day I first found Sabrina’s name in the Foundling Hospital Records; the moment I unfolded the Apprentice Indenture that bound her to Richard Lovell Edgeworth; sitting in the National Library of Ireland holding her letters; standing before the slab of stone worn blank in Kensal Green cemetery that marked her grave.

During the past few weeks I have visited both the National Arboretum at Alrewas in Staffordshire and the Red at Night event at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley. Both got me thinking about how the past and present interact.

One of the criticisms of heritage sites and the ways in which the past is presented is that, in order to be acceptable the past has to be sanitised, neutralised and commodified. The grime and smells, the illness and death, brutality and grinding dullness of our ancestors lives have to be erased from their stories, otherwise heritage just won’t sell – and let’s face it, selling our past is, in some cases, the only way it is going to survive. But to some, this is fraught with danger and the past becomes some sort of banal Heritage Fun Park.

I have some sympathy with Jones. The First World War was a monumental waste of human life; the culmination of centuries of imperialism, empire-building, one Royal, extended family’s dysfunction writ large and the quieter patriotism of ordinary people put to the ultimate test. It was brutal, vile, dehumanising and devastating and the images of Dix should be seen and not forgotten.

But here’s the thing – people flocked to see Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red. It touched a cord; something happened to awaken an understanding in some people, possibly for the first time, of the impact of four years of war, one hundred years previously. Just for a brief moment, the past spoke to the present, even if it was only to visually represent the sheer numbers of British men who lost their lives.

People also flocked to the Black Country Living Museum for the Red by Night event. “Deeply aestheticised, prettified and toothless” is a phrase that some might apply to the Black Country Museum, and Ironbridge Gorge Museums, Beamish Living Museum of the North and most other heritage sites in the country. As the evening darkened, crowds flocked to the Halahan Mill, replicated within the museum from the Birchley Rolling Mill at Oldbury, as men demonstrated the skills of dragging and throwing red-hot steel in and out of a rolling mill.

Hand rolling steel at the Red by Night event at The Black Country Living Museum

Across the heritage site, smoke from the strategically placed braziers, also blazing bright with light and flame, sent a pall of thin smog into the night air, giving a small sense of the blackness by day and redness by night that the event was trying to recreate.

But it would be nothing compared to the heat, the smell, the noise, and the grime of the real thing. Nothing will bring back those days, because nothing can, for no other reason than the Clean Air Acts have done their job. The past is precisely that; the past, gone, we cannot bring it back as it was; we cannot experience what our forefathers and mothers experienced (would they want us to?). We cannot feel the full sensory experience of a region in the full throes of an industrial revolution (or, as is possibly more accurate, an evolution) or the full horror of the First World War battlefields; all we can do is remember.

But remembering is a powerful act. While we can’t reclaim the past, we can listen to it, we can find ways of reaching out and touching it, briefly. We can try to imagine some of the grimness of life in an industrial town; the hard work, disease and industrial accidents, and be thankful for the progress made to change and make life better. But we must also remember our ancestors loved, laughed, danced and sang. The past was made up as much colour as darkness.

And surely we can find more than one way of remembering the death fields of the wars that have gone before; sometimes through ceramic poppies, sometimes through the war art of men like Otto Dix.

Last year, I attended a memorial service to mark ANZAC day. I stood on Cannock Chase on a breezy April morning, listening as the fallen of that most iconic of wars were remembered. Amazing Grace was sung, The Last Post was played and Laurence Binyon’s words were spoken,

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morningWe will remember them.

I saw an elderly gentleman, the medals lined across his overcoated chest testifying to his service, struggle with his emotions. In front of me lines of British Legion standards were raised, lowered and raised again in honour of the dead. Young men carried some of those standards and in the crowds were teenagers and children, listening and watching. On that Sunday, the past and the present touched and for a fleeting moment, generations met and remembered the lives, death and sacrifices of those who had gone before. Maybe there is no nobility in war, but there is a nobility in remembrance and that can only happened when the past and present meet.

If history does anything, it does this. It allows the past to whisper to us, not of its full horror, or even its full joy, that we cannot know; but of its existence, its stories, its lessons, its part in the on-going chain of life, of which we too are part. We are both the present of today and the past of future generations. If, as a part of history, heritage and remembrance sites do anything, they do this; find places for the past and present to meet, twisting the ribbons of time so the past is not forgotten.

I’m beginning to wonder we are heading towards a kind of societal dementia.

As anybody who has experienced the affect that dementia has on someone close to them, they will know it is a particularly insidious and cruel condition. Dementia eats away at a variety of thought processes; affecting language, problem solving and judgement. With the slow painful loss of these vital functions, a person’s sense of self can be stripped away; their personality can change until all that is left is a stranger in the family and they can be a stranger to themselves.

Memory is the key. Memory records our experiences, providing the building blocks to knowledge, understanding and skills. Memory is learning. Because of memory we can recall what has gone before and apply that experience to new and changing contexts. We develop thinking and language skills, learn how to problem-solve and make judgements. Memories tell us about our past, who we are and where we have come from.

Memories are our own personal archive. As long as we can access them, we can live and learn, share memories and build new ones, we can develop and grow. Dementia prevents us from accessing those memories, locking away all that we have experienced, learnt and loved away from us, leading to a creeping, perpetual forgetfulness; trapping us to an endless cycle of repetition.

Tragically, dementia is not something you can stop. Neither is it self-inflicted.

It would be a truism and a cliché to say we are living in difficult times. An economic crisis for which no one wants to take responsibility and an aging population, increasingly suffering from conditions such as dementia, have led to what those in public office refer to as “difficult decisions”, while brandishing the machete of austerity and hacking great lumps out of the public service budget.

And putting at very real risk our collective memory.

Heritage organisations such as museums, archives and libraries are not merely nice places to have. They are not luxury items that we can only afford in the good times, they are the custodians of our community and cultural memories, which they hold, in trust, on our behalf. They tell us not just our history, but our histories, all the strands of thought, knowledge and experience that have made us today. They can raise questions as much as provide answers, but only in questioning do we learn.

But these Sites of Memory only matter as long as we can access them. Just as our personal memories are only useful to us if we can get to them, and with them our experience, knowledge and skills, then our archives, museums and libraries are only useful to us, as a community, if we can get through the doors.

And increasingly, we can’t.

We will suffer culturally and intellectually from the lack of access to our own historical archives, our own community memory. It is a sad irony that the very architecture of one of these Sites of Memory currently under threat, the Library of Birmingham, was designed to highlight the treasures held within its Archives. Yet it now appears as if that “golden box” is destined to become increasingly inaccessible to the people of Birmingham, preventing access to our historical memory and increasingly, our sense of who we are as a society, a city, a country.

Right now, difficult decisions do need to be made. As someone who has experienced the devastation dementia causes, I know social care is a priority, but we cannot allow ourselves to be locked out of the places that hold our collective memories. We have to challenge those wielding the machete of austerity, we have to try and find another way or societal dementia will be as insidious and cruel as the real thing. It will affect our society, our communities, ourselves; it will be self-inflicted and equally as tragic.